My reply to the Philly Inquirer's Dick Pollman

The Philadelphia Inquirer published my letter the other day - a reply to Dick Pollman's piece about what he feels is the Republicans' increasing irrelevance to a majority of Americans - but they decided to edit out a key passage in which, while disagreeing strongly with Pollman's insinuation that the Republican's opposition to gay marriage is the cause of this decline in popularity, I express my support for gay marriage. Here's the original letter that I submitted to the Inquirer.

Dick Pollman's diatribe about how out of touch and irrelevant the GOP is (This Party's Over, 5/3) presents, as exhibit A, the party's opposition to gay marriage, and further argues that young people flocked to the Democratic party in the last Presidential election due, in large measure, to this issue, which renders the GOP in their eyes as " intolerant and exclusionary."

Yet, this explanation totally ignores the fact that Barak Obama himself, both as a candidate and now as President, is consistently on record as being in opposition to gay marriage - and has been very clear in his support of defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Further, with polls showing Americans pretty much evenly split on the issue - and with liberal states such as California voting against a gay marriage amendment - it is incorrect to argue that there is anything approaching a majority consensus on the issue.

While I happen to be a Republican who supports gay marriage, on both moral and more libertarian principles, I don't think that its fair of Pollman to characterize the many decent Americans, both Republicans or Democrats, who are on the other side of this difficult issue as backwards and reactionary. The fact is that, for many people on the Left (such as Pollman), the tolerance they so passionately advocate interestingly doesn't include tolerance for those on the other side of the political fence.